


The Wrongness of You

by dudaa



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Based on a Tumblr Post, Denial, Ectoplasm, Gen, Hurt Danny, Hurt No Comfort, One Shot, Slow Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:40:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29846484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dudaa/pseuds/dudaa
Summary: "He couldn’t run from the facts anymore. He couldn’t deny them. It ran in his veins now, cold and toxic. He really wasn’t human anymore, was he?"Danny didn't become a ghost right away. The changes came over time. And the less human he started to perceive himself, the worst it got.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 86





	The Wrongness of You

**Author's Note:**

> This was an idea I got from [this](https://dp-marvel94.tumblr.com/post/644554771949289472/if-halfa-ghost-forms-werent-a-thing-and-danny-was) tumblr post :) I hope I linked it right, because I'm terrible with both computers and Tumblr hahah. I also crossposted it on ff.net. Hope you guys enjoy it!  
> 

The knife clattered to the floor.

Danny just stood there, incapable of moving an inch as he stared at his hand. His hand that was currently oozing _something_. Something that looked so _wrong_. _You know what it is_ , was the whisper coming from the corner of his mind. There was no mistaking it. Not when he lived with ghost hunters who had it stored for study in the lab downstairs. Not when part of his chores was to clean up the emerald stains on the metal table after a particularly nasty experiment.

Ectoplasm.

He watched as it dripped on the cutting board. Neon green.

Drop.

Drop.

Drop.

He couldn’t take his eyes off of it, and each second seemed to stretch into infinity as his breaths got shakier and his hands trembled more. 

His blood wasn’t blood anymore. _His blood wasn’t blood anymore_.

He was- he was bleeding ectoplasm.

As in, the very same thing that ghosts are made of. He couldn’t run from the facts anymore. He couldn’t deny them. It ran in his veins now, cold and toxic. He really wasn’t human anymore, was he?

.

It’s not like Danny hadn’t noticed it until now. He had. But he’d made the decision to pretend he hadn’t. To ignore his thoughts and hope they’d vanish. He tried so hard to forget. Every time he would get the impression of something about him being off, he’d shake it off and pass it as just a trick of the light. A bit of ecto-contamination. All humans are like this. It had always been this way, he just hadn’t realized it before. Yes, that was it.

It had started with his hair.

When he stepped out of the portal, shaking and out of breath, feeling cold and at the same time burning up, he caught a glance at his image in the mirror. As Sam and Tucker helped him walk to the sink on the corner of the lab, both also terribly unsteady and weak on their feet, his eyes were glued to that one streak of white hair that seemed so bright against the ebony waves.

Danny splashed some cold water on his face, barely registering the fact that it didn’t seem that cold anymore. Maybe hair whitening was a part of being electrocuted?

 _Electrocuted_. He almost died! It hurt so, so much, he surely didn’t think he would come out of there alive. But there he was, breathing and well, right? Just the same as always. Minus the hair. That little streak of white hair.

“I- I’m fine, you guys. Really.” He reassured his friends as they took him to his room. “It was just a shock, a, uhm-, nasty shock, but- but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

He said that even as he didn’t believe it himself. Even as his voice sounded raspy, and his throat hurt ( _from all the screaming?_ ), and his head felt like he’d just stepped out of a spinning wagon.

Laying in bed that night, after hearing his parents go from excited to worried as they heard of the events of the day, after being examined and hugged and kissed ( _“We’re so glad you’re okay!”_ ), Danny couldn’t help but wonder: was he really?

For some reason, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it all. That the white streak in his hair and the faint Lichtenberg scar that now adorned his arm were not the only changes in him. That, as dreadful as it already was, there was more to come. And maybe things would never be the same for him.

He pressed his eyes shut as hard as he could and told himself to forget ( _forget!_ ) about it.

He missed the way the scar in his arm glowed a faint neon green in the darkness of the room, lost in silent sobs as he fell asleep.

.

Over the next few of weeks, Danny would often look in the mirror to see that little streak of white being bigger than the night before.

It _was_ bigger than before, wasn’t it?

Danny thought maybe he was paranoid. His family barely mentioned The Accident anymore if not to say how wonderful and a genius Danny was to have figured out how to turn the portal on. 

Did they forget he had almost died?!

But then, could it really have been this bad if his parents were so relaxed about it? Was he the one overreacting?

He ran his hands through his bangs again. _Almost half of my hair is white_. Had it whitened this much already? Why did nobody say anything?

Though with the number of ghosts that now terrorized the city on an almost daily basis, Danny couldn’t exactly blame people for not giving a shit that poor little Danny Fenton now had some white hair. They had more to worry about.

One night, when preparing to go to sleep, right after turning off the lights, Danny caught a mop of luminous, brilliant white with the corner of his eye. For a moment, his heart raced and screamed: _ghost_! Those monsters were everywhere! Turning around fast to call his parents (the ghost hunters, they’ll destroy it!), he stumbled on his own feet upon noticing it was _him_ who was glowing.

That outrageously big and glaring streak of white hair. _Was he the monster?_ He got more creeped out than he wanted to admit.

Danny bought black hair dye the very next day.

.

He’d been dying his hair for days now. Everyday. There probably was no natural black hairs left in his head. And it seemed the fake color wouldn’t stick for anything in this world either. Did people normally have to redye their hair this often? _No, obviously_. _You’re a freak, hadn’t you noticed?_

Danny shook his head as if it would scare such thoughts away. He wasn’t a freak. Maybe the shock from the portal was just making him go prematurely grey ( _glaring white_ ), that’s all. _Normal_.

But that wouldn’t explain his eyes, would it?

He had the impression they had been blue before. A baby blue that had always earned him lots of compliments.

“Such beautiful eyes you have there, Danny!”

Had they always had green in them? Radioactive green? Had they always glowed, too?

It seemed everything in him glowed these days. _Like the ghosts_. But no, that had nothing to do with ghosts. Glowing was perfectly normal and human, surely. Danny had always glowed. He was- He was sure of it.

The green in his eyes seemed to be spreading, too. Like the white in his hair.

.

They were completely green, Danny’s eyes. _They had always been._

He could be his own night light, now.

He didn’t want his parents to see him anymore. Not in the dark. He didn’t want them to see him glowing. He didn’t want them to shoot him.

But they wouldn’t shoot him, would they? Danny wasn’t a ghost. He just glowed a bit like them. And his eyes were the same energetic green from ectoplasm, but it was just a coincidence. He was human. Wasn’t that how humans looked like? That was how he’d always looked like, he knew it. _I’m not a ghost_.

But why did that nagging whisper keep telling him that maybe he was?

.

As Danny walked down the street back from an afternoon at Tucker’s, the sky already darker than he would have liked, he passed a girl playing in front of her house. She couldn’t have been older than seven.

The way she looked at him chilled him to the bone. Her eyes widened immediately and they were so full of _fear_. She screamed and cried and ran inside. “ _There’s a ghost out there, Momma!_ ” He could still hear her as she sobbed.

_Was he the ghost?_

Danny barely got out of his room anymore.

At some point, he bit his tongue. It seemed his teeth were sharper. Deadly, even. Were those fangs?

His ears tapered at the end. People shuddered from his touch. Sometimes his feet wouldn’t even touch the ground. He fell through his bed after a nightmare. Was he even breathing?

And now the blood. Or the lack thereof. He was bleeding ectoplasm.

.

Danny floated closer to the mirror, brushing away strands of bright ivory hair, which also glowed faintly with reflected green. Were they really black once? His eyes shone unnaturally in the murky darkness of his room, casting eerie shadows on his face. Radioactive green, pulsing with an otherworldly energy. He had grown used to his ghost form over time. Over the time he realized he _had_ died that day. That even though it took a while to take hold, his ghostly nature caught up with him.

He had got scared of his parents. He looked like a ghost. _He was a ghost_. His parents destroyed ghosts. Danny thought it was better to run away.

This was his new normal. The mysterious air he carried, his chilling aura that seemed to make the temperature fall every time he entered a room, the way gravity lost any pull it had ever had on him.

But every now and then he’d see himself alone in a dark room, with only his own body as a source of light, with the edges of the mirror frosting over with the cold radiating from his core, deep in his chest, and he’d be reminded just how _wrong_ it all was. How creepy and frightening his spectral form was and could be. How his own friends, whom he had trusted with his secret, with his changes, when taken by surprise had shrieked away from him more than once, barely covering their looks of fear over the undead figure before them.

It was in times like this, when he paid attention to the faint glow of ectoplasm just underneath his skin, that Danny got down that dangerous line of thought, wondering over and over again just how much of a freak he was.

And it seemed that the more he though about it, the worst it got. The freakier he became.

He had begun to look less and less human, and each change got him feeling more and more _monstruous_. Was that all he was in the end? A monster, like the ghost stories he had heard all his life?

Glowing tears rushed down and froze one on top of the other on his cheeks. He had lost his humanity little by little, and by the time he first realized it ( _you saw it coming, though, didn’t you?_ ), he could barely remember how being human even felt like anymore. There was a huge chunk missing from the person he was before The Accident, a chunk of humanity he could never possibly get back. And noticing that was what pushed him over the edge. What made him loose even _more_. 

It was impossible to look at him and mistake him for a human. He was so obviously _ghostly_. So dead. So unnatural. Such a freak.

And now every time he would look in the mirror, he would see sharper fangs and brighter eyes. Greener blood ( _it’s not blood, Danny, stop pretending_ ) and pointier ears.

What would his parents think, if they knew? If they knew there was a ghost floating in their son’s bathroom? Would they shoot the ghost? Would they shoot their son?


End file.
